Aug 12, 2007

What Happened in Ames?

I must confess; I am definitely a Ron Paul Junkie. I currently
work two jobs. One provides a meager wage while my partner and I bootstrap a
start-up. The other is the start-up. On Saturday, the day of the Ames Straw
Poll, I had to work out the technical issues for a Sunday launch of a new
software version. In spite of Sunday night's looming deadline, I found
myself with three browser windows open, one tuned to
JustinTV, one locked on to
RedStateEclectic
and the other directed at Lew
Rockwell's blog. In between deploying and testing software, I was
refreshing the blogs to get up-to-the-minute reports. Thank goodness for the
Internet and live blogging or I might have had to abandon the start-up.
There's more truth than humor in that last statement though I probably won't
be enrolling in a twelve-step program until after the general election.

So what happened in Iowa? The results are a mixed bag. Fifth is a commendable
finish at this point in Ron Paul's campaign. With 9.1% of the vote total, Ron
Paul's campaign has called into serious question the credibility of major
polling organizations who put his support at 2% or less in the state of Iowa.
The result exceeds poll results plus the margin of error for almost every poll
conducted. Fifth won't put Ron Paul in the White House. However, the result
indicates that significant momentum is building for the Ron Paul campaign. He
can no longer be considered "fringe" - though he probably will continue to be
characterized as such, or ignored, by the mainstream media.

Roughly 26,000 tickets were sold to the Straw Poll. The final vote tally was
14,302 some 9,500 less than the 1999 Straw Poll. Clearly, there wasn't a lot
of excitement for the GOP field by Iowa Republicans this year. But why the
discrepancy between recorded votes and the number of tickets sold? The 12,000
vote discrepancy could be accounted for by people who didn't show up to claim
tickets purchased for them by campaign organizers. Marc Jacoby of The Wall
Street Journal
reported
Romney might purchase up to 10,000 tickets:

Iowa Republicans say they expect Mr. Romney to purchase about 10,000 tickets
to the event for supporters. A spokesman for Mr. Romney, Kevin Madden, called
that number "grossly inflated" but declined to say how many tickets the
campaign would buy. Any Iowa resident who attends can vote.

If Romney did purchase 10,000 tickets he certainly didn't get his money's
worth. The expenditure resulted in a little less than half that many casting a
vote for him. The Ron Paul campaign reported a purchase of around 800 tickets.
Assuming the vote is properly counted, Ron Paul received roughly 500 more
votes than the campaign purchased. But there's the rub. Was the vote properly
counted? As conspiratorial as that question may sound, it is being asked more
and more with regard to U.S. elections and for good reasons. For one, it is a
legitimate question. For another, there have been enough elections tainted by
the use of electronic voting machines to cause the ermergence of a cottage
industry in activism dedicated to scrutinizing and improving voting practices.

An hour after the deadline to announce the results had passed the Atlantic
reported
4500
votes had to be re-counted. The De Moines Register later reported that
1500
votes were under scrutiny. It is unclear which number is correct. According to
the Iowa GOP, there were 20 voting machines and a total of 14,203 votes. The
average for each machine would be 710 votes per machine - assuming all
machines were used equally. The De Moines Register article reports two
machines having problems which would be consistent with the 1500 votes report.
The Register also reports that ballots were recounted by hand and then fed
into a ballot scanner. The electronic counter's tally was the one used for the
final announcement, not manual recounts.

In 1995, the Ames vote tally was delayed by over two hours. Alan Keyes grew
impatient enough to march up to the Iowa GOP Straw Poll offices that year and
demand that the door be opened and that officials make an accounting of their
activities. They shortly came out to report that Bob Dole and Phil Graham had
tied, each receiving 2582 votes. This was the first year that the Iowa GOP had
made use of electronic voting machines. The result was controversial but
wasn't challenged.

Prior to this year's Straw Poll, activists raised questions about the use of
electronic voting machines. A small group demanded that the Iowa GOP use paper
ballots and that the ballots be visible throughout the entire process. They
even went so far as to file a
lawsuit. A
Judge threw out the suit on the grounds that this wasn't a real election. The
Iowa GOP, though it didn't concede any demands, was forced to respond. It
issued a statement on August 8, attempting to alleviate any concerns about the
security and accuracy of the upcoming vote. Unfortunately, it raised more
questions than it answered.

The Diebold machines used for counting Straw Poll votes were the "Accu vote
Optical Scan (OSx) tabulator", according to the Iowa GOP. The machines
are leased from Diebold by the State of Iowa for use in local and federal
elections. Iowa election officials would be tasked with certifying Straw Poll
results. While the lawsuit filed may have had no legal merit, it is somewhat
troubling that the same machines to be used in the primaries and general
election proved to be unreliable. Whether or not the equipment properly
counted the votes is a question that can only be answered by a manual recount
of the paper ballots. Since Ron Paul supporters can be proud of the results,
and won't want to invite charges of "sour grapes", we may never know the
answer.

When supporters initially raised questions about how votes might be recounted,
the Iowa GOP responded with conflicting answers. To Arizona radio host
Ernest
Hancock, Mary Tiffany, the Iowa GOP communications director, claimed that
there would be no hand recounting of paper ballots if problems arose. On
August 7, Jesse Benton, Director of Communications for the Ron Paul campaign,
revealed to radio
host Dale Williams that the Iowa GOP had informed him a paper ballot recount
would cost the campaign 184,000 dollars - the equivalent of 5,250 tickets to
the show.

What the Iowa GOP didn't
disclose
in its attempt to reassure, was that the Story county elections officials
overseeing the Straw Poll results, also worked for, and had received campaign
donations from Mitt Romney.
Mary
Mosiman, the Story County auditor for elections, is on Mitt Romney's
leadership
team.
David A. Vaudt, quoted in the Register article,
received
$1000 from Romney's Commonwealth PAC in 2004. Mitt Romney's team counted
the votes. That's what the Iowa GOP meant when they wrote
"Voting at the Iowa
Straw Poll: Fraud-Proof, Honest & Secure".

Those who cast the Votes, they decide nothing. Those who count
the votes, they decide everything. The Memoirs of former
Stalin's secretary (1992) by Boris Bazhanov

Saturday's glitch in Iowa did not involve ballot output; it involved ballot
counting. The machines used for recording votes delivered paper ballots. Those
ballots were scanned by Diebold's optical scanning machines and the totals
produced by the machines were then delivered to Straw Poll officials.

Vickie Karp is the National Chair of the
Coalition for Visible
Ballots and PR Director of
VoteRescue. She is also co-editor and
co-author with Abbe Delozier of the book
HACKED!High Tech Election Theft in America. I talked with her at length on
Sunday about what happened at the Straw Poll and nationwide efforts to insure
transparent and accurate elections. VoteRescue’s founder, Karen Renick,
authored a bill that was sponsored by a member of the Texas' Legislature which
would have required hand-counted paper ballots in all precincts in Texas, no
exceptions. Unfortunately, the bill never made it out of committee. Counting
paper ballots by hand, with property security measures, says Karp, "is the
only way that vote results can be trusted."

The
New
York Times and other mainstream outlets have treated the issue of vote
fraud with a jaundiced eye. This has extended into alternative media sources.
Karp says that the issue does have a conspiratorial patina applied by the
mainstream media. "What I tell people is that they can either continue to
stick their head in the sand or take a look at the hard data available. There
is plenty of it. The mainstream is owned by a total of six corporations [all
licensed and regulated by the federal government]. Of course they're going to
treat this as conspiratorial."

Many, including myself, find it extremely uncomfortable to think that our
elections can be easily manipulated. Supporting a candidate with time and
money could be rendered fruitless and that is almost unbearable to consider.

Karp and I discussed the claim made by Iowa GOP officials that the vote was
secure and transparent. Karp says that this simply cannot be considered
credible. The mere use of the electronic ballot counters removes the count
from view, even if there is a poll-watcher present during the ballot counting
process. What occurs inside the machine can't be verified by a novice. Indeed,
the software is proprietary. No third-party can verify what is occurring
inside the box and voting companies want to protect their intellectual
property. Kathleen Wynn, formerly the Associate Director of
Black Box Voting, and one of the
researchers and videographers who filmed Bev Harris during the making of
"Hacking
Democracy", had originally planned to document the Ames vote count. But
the vote counting was closed to the public, and especially to citizen
videographers, so for her that rendered a trip pointless.

The issue of accuracy in elections reaches far beyond Ames. In many states,
the incestuous nature of election machine manufacturers and public officials
goes unchecked. In
San
Diego County, the current registrar of voters, Deborah Seiler, was the
very person who sold the county its voting machines while she worked as an
employee of Diebold. In numerous states, election officials appear on voting
manufacturers' marketing brochures. While it may be hard to prove malfeasance
on the part of elected officials, concern for their careers would probably not
motivate them to admit that electronic voting isn't secure.

In "Hacking Democracy", (an HBO documentary which has been nominated for an
Emmy this year), Bev Harris and associates demonstrate how easily electronic
voting machines can be hacked to change election results. In fact, the very
same machines used to count votes in Ames yesterday. It was so easily
demonstrated that as a result, California, Iowa and Pennsylvania were forced
to remove Diebold machines from use prior to the May, 2006 elections. State
investigations into ballot scanning and recording machines have recently
caused Florida and California officials to suspend certification for certain
models until proper security patches can be delivered. One of the machines
implicated in the
California
and
Florida
studies is the same model used for the Straw Poll's count on Saturday.

An important point Karp makes regarding election technology is that it should
be verifiable by the majority of the electorate who are not technology
experts.Voters should not have to put their trust
in technology experts to inform them when elections are secure. The experts
may be trustworthy and credentialed. But voters should not have to put their
faith in machines and experts when it comes to such a simple task as tallying
vote totals. The vote should be easily verified by any literate person able to
count.

The very act of questioning elections officials in any capacity will
invariably lead to controversy and hard-feelings. An open, transparent
process, something that has been recently lacking in U.S. elections, must be
restored so that the electorate and election officials are not at odds with
each other. For Karp, VoteRescue, the Coalition for Visible Ballots, and many
other election integrity activists around the country, this would mean paper
ballots, hand-counted at the precinct level, with security measures and totals
posted at the precinct level.

There is no way to know whether the vote was properly tabulated on Saturday.
Any push to hand-count the paper ballots (if they still exist) will invariably
create friction and it may not be worth it, politically or personally to
perform an autopsy in Ames. However, the same machines, elected officials and
processes will be used in the upcoming primaries and general election. The
grass-roots needs to keep this in mind as the campaigns roll on. Ron Paul is
not the only candidate effected and Ron Paul's supporters are not the only
voters who will be at the mercy of the closed, insecure, electronic systems
used nationwide.

Treating this as a fringe issue is not an option. Yes, there will be the
necessity to partition efforts away from any candidate's message and the
temptation to enhance personal agendas is something to avoid. But no candidate
can expect to prevail if the very means by which the voters endorse them is
compromised by an insecure, secret process which cannot be verified by any
willing citizen.

For another take on it, "Margin of Error Ballots of Straw." This political intrigue/romance has made a true believer out of me. Can the voting machines be hacked? Absolutely. Could a more sinister motive from an insider be the cause of the chronic voting anomolies? I wonder.